Robinson has experienced the profession from several different positions. After playing, he coached at Manchester City and Portsmouth before moving into non-league management in 1993.
He subsequently managed clubs including Cheltenham Town and the FA representative team, before making a conscious decision to move into recruitment. Chelsea appointed him as a local academy scout in 2012, and he progressed through the club's recruitment department before leaving in November 2023. He is now head of Academy recruitment at Southampton, while also running Scouting Game, a business assessing players through video.
His experience at Chelsea, where he spent almost 12 years, gave him an education at the highest level of youth development. It also helped shape his understanding of what makes a successful scout, and why the job is about considerably more than watching football matches.
Why the experienced scout still matters
When asked about the advantages of an experienced human scout over a purely data-led approach, Robinson explained:
"It's that instinct, I suppose, built on experience, which allows you to know this player who's playing in a lower level game, he could translate his skills and his application, his performance, into a higher level, and because usually as a Scout, you're not Scouting at the level that you want the player to play at.
"They might be young, you're looking at what would they be in a couple years, or you're looking now at this level, and I want to, my team's this level, I want to recruit up, so a lot of the judgment you have to bring is whether that player can translate.
"So if you're experienced enough, you'll have seen players over the years who will have made that step, and you will know that certain things like pace, finishing ability, vision, these are translatable things, they are the things that will still be good at two levels above or whatever.
"Your experience gives you reference points as well. You can say this kid at 14, he reminds me of Conor Gallagher at 14, or actually he's, you know, Mason was like that, so you've got the reference points, and although every player's an individual, you can say, yeah, I can see where that he might go, or what he might be, because I've seen that sort of player.
"And negatively, you might say, look, that player's been very successful because he's bigger and stronger, if he took that away, would he be still be a good player? So your experience gives you all these reference points and context, because all we're doing when we're watching, we're watching a game of football, we're watching a player, there's no other context other than that, you have to bring the context of where do they fit in the scheme of things."
He tells Football Presse, "We can do, and through our business, assessments of players all around the world, and say, yes, that under 12 is a top class player, because I've seen so many under 12 top class players. If you haven't seen them, you don't know whether they look like that at that age, you have to have been through it. So these are the advantages that experience can bring, those reference points, that context, otherwise, you're sort of shooting in the dark. You can tell where someone's performance is good, but you can't judge their potential as well, without that experience."
How data and video have transformed scouting
That does not mean Robinson believes modern scouting should resist technology. Quite the opposite. He has made a point of keeping up with the changes in the profession, including completing a course through the League Managers Association on using data in football recruitment.
"I was determined not to get left behind by the younger generation who are comfortable with data. I've always been comfortable with spreadsheets and data and so on, so it wasn't difficult for me, but I knew, I knew I had the experience, and I believe I had the eye for it, as we say, but I wanted to be comfortable with the data as well."
He sees a generational divide between scouts who built their careers through traditional methods and younger recruits who are more familiar with technology.
"A lot of them will not be comfortable with the new technology, which is absolutely a part of scouting now. With your reporting as a scout, your product is your report. You know, that's what you're there to produce, and so now you're required to input those on apps, of course you can do it, but certainly remotely, and not a lot of that old guard are comfortable with that sort of scouting.
"They used to, you know, phoning the chief scout after a game and saying, yeah, when he did this, did that, and that's it. Well, those days have gone. You know, we're all data led."
Robinson also recognises that younger scouts bring a different skill set, having grown up with the technology and data now used throughout elite recruitment. But he believes enthusiasm and qualifications alone are not enough to establish a career.
How to break into football scouting
"The jobs have expanded but there are still not that many full-time jobs still in clubs. It is a sector of the industry driven by part-time work, and actually to get into that part-time work, you have to often go and volunteer at a smaller club, you know, and work for nothing, and show you're willing, and go out and do it, and show your reports, and learn the trade, and build your network.
"One of my sons is doing that now in non-league as a volunteer, because that is the way forward. Not all of the younger generation have the patience to do that. It's not that sort of industry where it's easy to get that payback quickly, you have to serve your time, and you have to build your network. Scouting is all about network, and that takes time to do."
For those who want to progress into full-time recruitment, Robinson advises developing skills beyond identifying players.
"To get a full-time job as a Scout, and I've told so many young Scouts this over the years, it's not just enough to be a good Scout, you usually have to have something else, you usually have to be really comfortable with the data, or good at managing people, or be able to coordinate and organize, plan schedules, fix the schedules for people, you usually need another string to your bow to make the full-time job, other than just Scouting."
The technology has also changed the way clubs organise their searches. Robinson explained how Southampton can use specialist data services to identify potential recruits in non-league football, rather than requiring scouts to watch every available team.
He gave the example of looking for a left-back for the club's under-21 side. Southampton could specify the age range, the level of non-league football and the requirement for regular first-team appearances, with the service then returning a shortlist.
"Here's the top 10 on the list, so that means my scouts, me and my scouts, we don't need to trawl through all the teams, now focus on that 10, and identify them. They can even help us get a video as well, which is even more time effective, cost effective.
"So using data in that way to narrow down your focus is absolutely the way to go with cost effective scouting, and using video to narrow, I mean 95% of first team scouting is by video now, you know, happens, that's, it's so cost effective to do it. So you can go a long way with the data before, and use your live scouts to really be the refining parts of the data at the end."
For Robinson, video and data are therefore tools to make recruitment more efficient, helping scouts decide where to concentrate their attention. They do not remove the need for somebody to make the final judgement.
Why the battle for England's best young players starts earlier
The increased use of technology has coincided with another major change: the competition for England's best young players has intensified, and clubs are moving earlier to secure them.
Robinson pointed to Brexit as one of the biggest factors. Previously, English clubs could recruit 16-year-olds from Europe, but the rules changed the age threshold to 18, making those moves considerably more difficult.
"What happened was suddenly there was this big focus on English players, and so the big clubs in the north, for example, when my scouts were turning up on the touch lines of Academy Games in London, which is the most productive area for professional players now, there will be scouts from Manchester United and Liverpool and Man City, because they knew they could take a kid at 16 from London, whereas they couldn't take them from Paris or Berlin or wherever."
He believes the pressure has subsequently moved the focus of recruitment to even younger ages.
"The second change that's happening now, partly as a further development of that, is that the Category 1 academies can take kids under 14 from anywhere in the country if they offer full-time education. That's been the case for a while, but now that that focus is on England and the 16s, that big threshold of scouting has shifted down to 14, and you'll see more and more of the big clubs stepping in to try and sign players at 14 and move them and put them in full-time education programs.
"So that's had a big effect, that pressure on English recruitment and consequent sort of lowering of the focused age, plus the revolution of video scouting are the two biggest changes in the last 10 years in my experience as a scout."
That increasingly competitive environment makes it important for clubs to identify talent outside the established academy system, too. Robinson still attends local grassroots tournaments in the hope of finding players who have not yet been recruited.
"Every week, you know, tomorrow, I'm actually going to go to a local grassroots tournament, it's only a few miles from where I live, so back to grassroots scouting tomorrow, and at all different ages I'll be there, and I go there in the hope that I can find someone outside of the academy system as a kid, who is good enough."
He also believes non-league football has become a more attractive source of talent, particularly for smaller professional clubs.
"The other big change in football for me, over the last 10 years, has been the improvement in standard of non-league football, so the outside, the, you know, the major professional leagues. I mean a lot of the top levels in non-league here in England are full-time, but the standards of coaching, the standards of facilities, the pitches, have improved tremendously, so now it's a happy hunting ground, certainly for the smaller clubs, to go and find someone in non-league, the gap has narrowed considerably."
Did the COVID generation lose a year of development?
There is, however, a question about whether the current generation of young footballers has been affected by the interruption to competitive football during the COVID period. Players who were around 13, 14 and 15 missed what was potentially a season of matches, and Robinson accepts that the consequences could be felt in their development.
But he is cautious about drawing firm conclusions.
"There's an argument, I heard it again this week, that the players aged about 13, 14, 15, missed probably a season of competitive football, and so a lot of the old time scouts now will say they're not as good as the previous generation, because they missed out a year.
"It's very difficult to compare in that way, it's a bit of an impression. I've never heard the old-fashioned scouts say at any time, this is a, there are better players here now than there were 10 years ago, they always say that players 10 years ago were better, everything was better, absolutely, the sun was brightly shining, so I take it all with a pinch of salt.
"But I think that there is that worry, that in the heart of our teenage years, we've got a generation that missed out on probably a year's worth of competitive football, so comparatively they might be lower, arguably, very hard to prove though, I think, and only time will tell really."
It is a measured conclusion from someone whose career has taken him from coaching and management into one of the most competitive areas of modern football. Technology can help clubs cover more ground, identify potential targets and make better use of their resources. The challenge is knowing what to do with the information, recognising what a player might become and understanding what cannot be measured by a spreadsheet.
For Robinson, that remains the value of the experienced scout: the ability to see beyond the performance in front of them and judge what might come next.